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John
Cassavetes’ Shadows: Deconstruction or Evolution

By John Shaw
York University, Toronto Canada.
yu129199@yorku.ca

In attempting to critique John Cassavetes’s film Shadows,
one must look to several factors which promoted this new cinematic
realism to take shape in America during the late 1950s. Hollywood
at this time was in fact producing films that were formulated to say
the least. Homogenized generic scripting and plots often revolved
around the hierarchy of a Star’s potency on and off the screen. Cassavetes
films radically challenged the well composed scene and the self resolving
plots in favor of a much needed realistic approach. The use of his
native New York as a sound stage might have also influenced the austere
outcome of these social dramas; they were definitely unlike the adventure
hero worship that was being produced in California. The pioneering efforts of Cassavetes and others brought
on an evolution in the New York cinematic avant-garde, thanks to of
all things, the success of television. The new era of television revived
the cinema as the primary erotic medium for a new generation, and
freed the film maker from his constant focus on education and entertainment
for profit so prevalent in Hollywood big business. The cinema virte
of Europe was of strong influence, but the social grit of the NY narrative
was fast evolving its own iconoclasm which Cassavetes would only now
be recognized for. John Cassavetes Shadows is an improvisational
film made in 1959, winner of the Critics Award at the Venice Film
Festival, and then distributed under the auspices of a British distributor
(recently re-released to video). It offers a compelling snapshot of
Beat culture in NYC as it intersected with racial tensions and subservient
position of women present even in “hip” society during the early 60’s.
An African-American jazz singer lives in a small NY flat with his
deadbeat brother and lovely 20 year old sister who both are light-skinned
and are clumsily introduced for half-siblings to the singer (their
relationship is never clarified). The trio throw desegregated cocktail
parties which sometimes lead to explosive social situations. While
they do their part for social justice, the ladies are somewhat stereotyped
as they dress nice and shop for husbands. The film was certainly made
on a shoestring budget, complete with jumpy editing and limited self-conscious
directing. Ultimately, however, it is the painfully candid and personal
quality of the characters’ stories which come through. One must remember
that this was Cassavetes’s first commercial venture, a fact often
overlooked by his critics. With Cassavetes films the greatest fear is the screenwriters,
directors, or editors formal arrangements might move to take away
from the improvisational quality of the performance- or even the actor’s
ability to convey the actual characters improvisation in his/her roles
in their lives. Both the actors and the parts they are playing fall
under this guise of documentary art form: where the actor is the act,
and vice versa. Trying to access this new underground of emotion through
technique , Cassavetes often saw the limitations of his equipment
as an impediment:

It’s not really interesting to me, at least,
to set up a camera angle. At some points in the filming
you really want to take the camera and break it for
no reason except that it’s just an interference and you
don’t know what to do with it.

Life for Cassavetes was an unforgiving reality without
compromise. He saw his camera sometimes as unable to capture this
reality in a way which he saw it unfolding. Many have concerned themselves
with attaching many adjectives to describe his technique such as deconstructing
narrative, new age documentary, improvisational acting, the long take,
the mind’s eye, etc. But Cassavetes himself seems very sure of what
his motivation was in creating these new and innovative forms,

Films today show only a dream world and have lost
touch with the way people really are... In this country,
people die at 21. They dieemotionally at 21, maybe younger... My responsibility
as an artist is to help people get past 21... The
films are a road map through emotional and intellectual terrain that provides a solution
on how to save pain”

So what are the different forms of pain that Shadows
submits for examination. Is it one’s self respect and dignity as cast
in Hue the black singer and father/brother figure- the insecurity
of not knowing who you are or what social role to play in society
as with Ben the trumpet playing Beat Boy- or the much deeper pain
striking to the very erotic center of your sexuality as in Lelia’s
fight with self esteem. Whatever form this pain might take, Cassavetes
was determined to capture it unfettered and without the softening
haze of the Hollywood Star machine. He wanted the realism of image
to interlace with the conflict of emotion while conveying its message
in a way which drew the viewer in, and the participants as actors
out of each scene. The one thing that must be recognized is the documentation
of different emotions which would be normally trimmed down, cut out,
or neatly packaged and arranged by Hollywood Star narratives. Each
player retains a relatively equal position avoiding the hierarchy
of roles so closely associated with the big allegorical production
of the day. The reality of this pseudo-documentary technique is achieved
through the spatial and linear motion of performance, or the metaphysics
of duration and direction of the scene. The long take encompasses
action and reaction together, without limiting or directionalizing
as the fast paced well made Hollywood narratives tend to do. The improvisation
of the actor acting out the role in this type of scene relies on a
anastigmatic approach to surrealism. This illusion of the actor’s
anarchistic reality based on improvisation stems from the perplexity
of audience reaction (they do not quite interpolating which cues they
need to make sense of the message offered). Hence the different readings
of each scene and the ability of the audience to become existential
within their own understandings of the character- they begin to see
themselves. This however raises several problems that any narrative
must confront, something which might not have been intentional on
Cassavetes part. Whenever you deconstruct something you take out vital
parts of its member which serve as the embodiment of the whole. Sort
of like if you could picture a narrative cut up into pieces and hung
up like a mobile; parts that used to be joined together, now work
independently and out of sync, flapping in the wind as might be. In
this case we are referring the narrative of a story which depends
on many cues to make its symbolic and metaphoric messages interpretative
by an audience. If too many sign posts are removed, too many cues
stripped of their identity and left for dead, the interpretive nature
is lost and the suspension of disbelief ceases to function. Whether
in the French “camera stylo of the Nouvelle Vague, or the German Kammerspiel
(chamber play), or the neorealism of Italian cinema, or the Manichean
Hollywood melodrama- the suspension of disbelief in my opinion is
essential for the transgression of emotion from artist to audience.
Without suspension of disbelief there is no eroticism, and thus, no
imagination. If surrealism was Cassavetes goal, identification through
suspension of disbelief is essential to the improvisational technique
of the pseudo-documentary (it makes the improvisation look real, hence
the rumors about Cassavetes’s semi-scripting). As example, I refer to the love scene in which Lelia
and Tony are in bed and ready to make love. As R. Carney in American
Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience
suggests,

The film fades out prior to their making love, to
fade back in on their post-coital conversation. (Here,
as in all of his future work, Cassavetes is as indifferent
to mere physical actions- in this case, the action
of making love- as he is fascinated by imaginative transactions-
of making something of one’s having made love.) The conversation that
follows is a tour de force of awkwardness, inarticulateness, and
insensitivity.

With this one cut the entire believability of the anti-star Lelia
was destroyed. Her cataclysmic confrontation with her own sensuality
and her inability to deal with her sexuality and cross race identity
was the whole point of her character. Her dealing with these intimate
issues on film was the whole point of the love scene and it was cut
out, like some trade mark snip, or inadequacy on the part of Cassavetes
to film such intimacy. The age of censorship was ripe in the 1950s,
but this is no excuse for not using a close up to capture facial expressions
i.e. her crying, or Tony’s indignation- something to convey believability
of the act and how it shaped their identities. This is not an isolated
incident, but rather a general complaint I have with his style of
disconjuncture of dialogue and action- where the two never seemed
to quite meet at the appropriate times. This is not to say this exclusion
of intimacy was for technique either, but rather I would say is due
to the lack of so called semi-scripting and direction. The progression of Lelia’s insecurity about her ethnicity,
as it reflects on her sexuality, and how both of these factors convolut
her femininity to the point of rebellion, is the foundation of her
character and her position in the narrative. To rob her of this discovery
within this scene is anti-climatic to say the least, and does little
to suspend our disbelief. She comes across not as a virgin, but as
a tramp, something which destroys her next lines, “ I was so frightened.
I kept saying to myself, I mustn’t cry. If you love a man, you shouldn’t
be frightened.” Why are we being told this and not shown this? Why
are we being subjected to a verbal explanation of her feelings and
motivation in a supposed documentation of the raw emotion through
improvisation. Is this indifference to physical action as Carney suggests?
Is Cassavetes’s use of “imaginative transactions” after the fact a
substitute for his inexperience as a director/screenwriter? Or is
this a Greek religious orthodoxy for privacy showing through in his
films? He isn’t in fact indifferent in the very physical fight scene
with the boys outside the soda shop. So why the naivete when it comes
to expressing Eros on film? Is this true to his art form, directing,
or style of photography? Putting personal complexities aside, which are often
shallow and without substance, the pseudo-documentary style that Cassavetes
explored, is a legacy which he will be remembered and chastised for.
But I do not think it is out of order to mention the narcissistic
nature of the style itself, and how the avant-garde film community
manipulated an otherwise self contained brilliance of the technique.
The long take might not have been so long- the pauses between lines
not so vague- and the endlessness of the narrative might not have
been so indifferent- had the competition among the film community
for uniqueness been a little less pervasive.

However, the realism achieved by the situation social
crisis film did create its responsibility towards the issues it
addressed. The bravery of Cassavetes in his uncompromising and unwavering
dedication to strip himself of the mainstream might have inadvertently
gave him his most valuable inspiration. To go against the ebb and
flow is not always easy, but sometimes it pays off in the hands
of a true guineas. Whether his temperament as a person, or film
maker succeeds him, the legacy of his work will always be proof
of his integrity.

This
is only the "To Print" page. To go to the regular page
of Ray Carney's www.Cassavetes.com on which this text appears,
click
here, or close this window if you accessed the "To Print"
page from the regular page. Once you have brought up the regular
page, you may use the menus to reach all of the other pages on
the site.